This pain is wholly self-inflicted, but that hasn’t stopped law students from suing to stem it. A few years back, recent grads filed a slew of lawsuits accusing their alma maters of duping them with exaggerated job placement stats.

This week, a law grad named Phillip Litchfield launched a fresh round of litigation when he filed a class action suit against the maker of bar exam software that he said “woefully underperformed” when tens of thousands of law grads used it to take the three-day test last month.

The defendant in the case is Florida-based ExamSoft Worldwide, the leading developer and distributor of exam management software, whose SofTest product is used by over 43 State Supreme Courts to electronically deliver the bar exam at a cost of between $100 and $150 for each test taker.

ExamSoft is one those companies that few non-law students would know about, unless something went terribly wrong, which is precisely what happened.

According to the complaint filed Monday in Illinois federal court, on July 29, the first day of the bar exam, thousands of individuals took the written portion of the bar exam using SofTest. As the lawsuit describes it, “after a full day of testing, the stress had first begun.”

After finishing the exam, test takers tried to upload their written answers to SofTest, but the software crashed and sent out contradictory emails on whether the answers had been accepted. The test takers were, of course, up against tight submission deadlines that, if missed, would result in a exam score of zero. Under pressure, some test takers inched into meltdown territory, which was documented by the frantic complaints posted on the Above the Law blog. One wrote:

I was up until 1:00 a.m. trying and praying for my exam to go through. When I finally did get to bed, I barely got 2 hours rest because I had to be up at 5:00 a.m. to start day two of the bar. ExamSoft hasn’t even published an apology. Each student paid $100 for this nonsense, and I’m sure they made a handsome profit. Quite frankly, it’s disgusting.

And another: “Software crashed. Website crashed. Tech support phone number disconnects you when you call for help. And we were forced to pay for the privilege of using this [software].”

ExamSoft did not immediately respond to Fortune‘s request for comment. On Tuesday, the software company was hit with two similar lawsuits—one in Illinois state court and another in Washington state federal court—over its test day debacle.

For the plaintiff Litchfield, “the most stressful part of the first day of the bar exam was not knowing—for hours—whether or not he had successfully submitted his exam before the deadline,” the complaint says.

The test takers eventually were able to submit their answers, but SofTest’s technological failure on the day of the exam was so bad that it constituted consumer fraud, negligence, breach of contract, and unjust enrichment, according to the lawsuit, which is seeking monetary damages along with attorneys’ fees.

The lawsuit says that Litchfield and the potential class of other test takers were injured because they suffered a “substantial failure in their functional use of [ExamSoft’s] product that they paid substantial money for,” as well as “stress, anxiety, and emotional distress”—even more than what they were already experiencing by enrolling in law school in the first place.

Northwestern Law dean: Never let a good crisis go to waste

(TippingTheScales) — Between its accelerated JD program and its insistence on interviewing every single one of its applicants, Northwestern University School of Law is known for doing things differently. Nevertheless, Dean Daniel B. Rodriguez wants to make it absolutely clear that innovating isn’t a matter of survival for the school, which, at No. 12 in the U.S. News ranking, has long been a member of the hallowed Top 14.

“We don’t have to do anything differently,” he asserts. “We’re greatly, greatly blessed by having an extraordinarily strong reputation, and have had that reputation for a century-and-a-half and counting, so I just want to quibble with the description of having to do things differently.” Point taken.

Rodriguez officially started as dean of Northwestern Law in January 2012. This isn’t his first time leading a law school; he’s been dean at the warmer (if less prestigious) University of San Diego School of Law. He’s also the current president of the Association of American Law Schools.

That’s a lot of responsibility, but Rodriguez shows few—if any—signs of burnout. In our conversation, Rodriguez discussed his role at Northwestern and the future of law schools in general. His view? Never let a good crisis go to waste.

There’s been a national decline in law school applicants. How has the decline affected Northwestern in particular?

We did see a slight decline in applications to Northwestern last year, but our decline’s been a lot lower than the national average. You never know what the future brings, but like many law schools in our cohort, the decline hasn’t been as steep; in some cases, schools have even seen a slight uptick. This current year—and we’re obviously still admitting our class for next year—applications are roughly flat, which is not a bad place to be right now.

Do you think the decline in applicants has leveled off, or do you think it’s going to keep going?

Boy, if I had a crystal ball on that, I’d be a real genius. Last year, there was such a substantial national decline, and a lot of law school deans said, “It’s got to be the bottom of the market, right?” People assume there has to be an uptick, because there’ll be a recovery and students will see an opportunity to get into better schools. But then a year goes by and there’s an additional decline. I will say this: The preliminary data I’ve seen on the students who have taken the LSAT this year suggests that we’re not seeing a big recovery—let’s put it that way.

Do you think the best and the brightest students are still attracted to law school, or do you think they’re being lost to other fields?

I think there are difficulties in the legal profession, real challenges concerning the way law firms and lawyers configure careers for young graduates. That, along with a fair amount of negative publicity about law schools, has made a lot of students—let’s call them the best and the brightest—take long, hard looks at whether law school is for them….

Now, where they’re going is a fascinating question. The data I’ve seen suggests that business school applications are down—not as much as law school, but they’re down—and it’s not clear that the so-called best and brightest are moving there instead, or moving into other graduate programs, frankly. We simply don’t know where they’re going.

How do you feel about law school rankings (especially the U.S. News ranking)?

Like most deans, I believe it was a generally good idea that’s gone horribly wrong. The idea that people should be given more information about law schools isn’t bad. Even though I went to law school before U.S. News rankings existed, we had conversations about which law schools were better. The notion that there are comparisons—that’s just life. What’s gone horribly wrong, I think, are two things that are specific to the U.S. News ranking.

First, the factors that go into the rankings can be very poor proxies for quality. U.S. News makes it very difficult to compare law schools on the dimensions that are most important to lawyers and law students. The second horribly wrong aspect I see in U.S. News’ ranking—and all running rankings, but U.S. News is the most powerful—is the false sense of precision that it gives students with regard to very small differences in the rankings of law schools. The problem arises when students make choices between the 7th ranked law school and the 11th ranked law school, or the 35th and the 45th. The notion that there’s a powerful, profound difference in the academic reputation and quality of a school based on five or six ranking points is absolutely absurd. And it’s distorted choices that law schools have made.

In what way has the U.S. News ranking distorted law schools’ choices?

It’s not the only reason, but one of the reasons for the exorbitant cost of legal education has been the efforts and energies most law schools put into improving their chances of moving up in the rankings. Now, I don’t want to go so far as to say that U.S. News should be blamed for that—they haven’t held a gun to the heads of law school deans—but they’ve contributed to a toxic environment.

When and why did Northwestern decide to start interviewing all of its candidates?

I think it started roughly a decade-and-a-half ago. In spite of how important grades, LSAT scores, and letters of recommendation are for all law schools—there’s no question that those are the central criteria that go into admissions—we felt that interviews gave us the ability to look at the whole candidate. It allowed us to understand how they articulated their goals and objectives….

Submitting a law school application is cold and informal, especially now, when with the flip of a switch, you can apply to 20 schools without much additional energy. We were trying to kind of leapfrog over that impersonality by developing this rapport.

Northwestern Law seems more concerned than other law schools in its cohort with admitting students who’ve had work experience. Why is that?

In the last couple of years, over 90% of our entering class—sometimes it’s been as high as 95%—has had work experience between college graduation and admission to Northwestern. This approach is very common among top business schools; most business schools have long required at least two years of work experience. So, when Northwestern began putting a strong emphasis on work experience about a dozen years ago, in some ways, we were taking a page from the playbook of leading business schools.

Quite simply, we find that this additional experience brings an interesting maturity to the student body. The diversity of experiences they’ve had in the workforce gives them a significant leg up in their study of law. Last but not least, I often hear from employers that they greatly value the emphasis we put on work experience, and that they would like to see all law schools develop that same emphasis.

In his speech at William & Mary, Justice Scalia lamented the fact that the law school curriculum is becoming more condensed and more customizable. Do you agree with his assessment?

Whenever a Supreme Court justice—certainly someone of Justice Scalia’s stature and experience—comments as thoughtfully as he did about law schools, we should listen. There was much of the speech I agreed with and much I disagreed with. A common criticism is that the third year’s a waste and we could lob it off without making any sacrifice. I think that’s hyperbole and a problematic strategy, and I think Justice Scalia was right to raise some concerns about it. (I’ll note that our accelerated program is three years of law school condensed into two.)

As for the point about the curriculum, let me just say this: If I could, I would ask the justice, “Well, do you think the law clerks that you have are less well-trained than they were 20 years ago? Do you think they have less information, less knowledge, less experience and expertise?” I doubt he would say that. And they’re the graduates of just the law schools he was making fun of.

What specialized areas of the law have Northwestern students been most interested in?

We’re seeing a very strong interest in experiential learning. That includes clinical legal education, simulation courses, courses where there’s a great amount of teamwork, and interdisciplinary work at the intersection of law and business. Students are demanding courses, seminars, externships and other curriculum that will give them substantial, practical legal skills, and the ability to demonstrate and deploy those skills while they’re still here in law school.

A second area that students are really pushing us to develop specialties in is what I call work at the intersection of law, business, and technology. We’re starting a brand-new program in the fall, and it’s called the Master of Science in Law program. The goal is not to train lawyers. It’s to teach STEM-trained individuals legal skills.

What’s the biggest challenge you’re facing right now?

The biggest challenge is maintaining and improving our academic programs and professional programs while keeping costs in check. If I had a blank check, the kinds of programs I would build would truly boggle the mind, because there’s just so much we could do to improve legal education. But almost without exception, those programs are enormously resource-intensive, and I cannot justify simply increasing tuition year after year and adding to student debt.

On the flip side, if I engage in radical surgery and do what you read about in the blogs—“Why don’t law schools cut tuition in half? Why don’t they do all these things?”—that would cut our ability to engage in things like clinical education, financial aid…. So the single biggest challenge that I face as dean is to continue accelerating our momentum by improving our academic programs and being innovative without having students bear the brunt of those changes. That is why deans spend so much time raising money and diversifying our revenue picture.

What opportunities are you especially excited about?

There’s a famous phrase that’s often associated with either President Obama or Mayor Rahm Emmanuel of Chicago: “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” I really feel that that’s a bellwether for what law schools are trying to do. We’re clearly in a crisis, but let’s take this very challenging time and use it to make some real change. Then, we’ll see this period of time positively: We’ll see it as a time in which we were willing to experiment and innovate in extremely interesting ways.

The vanishing law degree

Law schools are under attack for overpromising employment. Don’t blame the education, blame the economy.

Once upon a time — assuming you didn’t want to be a dermatologist — you went to a fine law school, remained sentient in class, and got a job as an associate at a large law firm in a big city. You didn’t know how to take a deposition or do a deal, but no matter: Plenty of corporations retained firms to do gobs of document searching and contract drafting; and that meant you, to the mellifluous tune of $160,000, plus perks, got hired to do it.

Then came the 2008 worldwide economic collapse. Jobs that seemed automatic were no longer. The hiring squeeze meant fewer prized spots for law students, whose ranks have grown over the past decade. At the non-elite law schools, the chances of getting hired on Wall Street or on Sand Hill Road have especially dwindled. A wave of hyperbolic media stories inevitably followed: Young law graduates were becoming baristas at Starbucks, moving back in with their parents, or both. Anti-law-school screeds have become a growth industry. A popular blog is called Inside the Law School Scam. Its author: a law professor at the University of Colorado (who doesn’t appear to appreciate irony).

Law graduates, being law graduates, have chosen to litigate, arguing in Gomez-Jimenez v. New York Law School that they were duped into attending law school by robust employment statistics published by institutions that failed to distinguish between working in a Cravath conference room and behind a Chipotle counter. Those litigants lost their first round in court in March after a New York state judge ruled the students were “sophisticated” enough to know the risks, and that “issues posed by this case exemplify the adage that not every ailment afflicting society may be redressed by a lawsuit.” The court, too, might have emphasized, as outgoing dean Larry Kramer of Stanford Law School points out, that virtually every industry has had a downturn since 2008. Investment banks and private equity firms have cut back too. Employment is always cyclical — law-firm hiring had another valley in the ’80s before the boom of the ’90s.

The larger problem with the brief against law schools is that it ignores what’s happening in the marketplace. Competition for jobs is lessening, since not as many folks apparently now want to go to law school. Administrations of the LSAT admissions test are down 16% from last year, the largest decrease ever. New technology has further hurt employment prospects: Software is now capable of drafting basic real estate documents, and you don’t need to provide benefits to a piece of software. Some simple work is being outsourced overseas. Might this signal a cultural shift among corporations? Or is it simply a realization that a trained monkey might be just as good at making photocopies as a $300-an-hour 25-year-old fresh out of Yale? A career in dermatology may yet beckon.

Law school fuzzy grad jobs stats: A federal offense?

Columbia Law School has been subject to increased scrutiny over its job placement stats.

Every year, law school deans anxiously await the release of national rankings, and for good reason. A school’s prestige, revenues, and perhaps even its future depend on them.

The U.S. News & World Report released their famed rankings on Tuesday, and even deans of successful law schools may find that snagging a top spot on the list may come at a harsh cost.

Accusations that law schools have “gamed” the system by providing incomplete, misleading, or even downright false data on incoming students and graduate employment have marred the competition. So far, law schools are brushing off legal suits by jobless, or seriously underemployed, graduates and other efforts to pry open precise employment data, and clinging to the ivory-tower system of plentiful applicants with deep pockets.

But law school officials may take notice — and umbrage — when they see the title of a new study by two law school professors: “Law Deans in Jail.”

The 77-page paper, written by Emory University School of Law professors Morgan Cloud and George Shepherd, concludes that widespread manipulation of law school graduate employment data may have not only pushed institutions higher in the national law school rankings, but also could be considered “mail and wire fraud under federal law.”

The U.S. News ranking of the country’s law schools may be so flawed by deceptive or misleading statistics submitted by the country’s law schools that “the harm done for many years to thousands of people has been so severe, it should not be hard to recognize the need for investigations by federal authorities to determine whether crimes have been committed,” the pair conclude in the paper.

“We have simply looked at law schools and the rankings as if they were any other industries, subject to the same laws that apply to everyone else,” says Cloud in an interview about the draft study, which was published on the Social Science Research Network.

Outrage spreads to top-tier schools

So far, Cloud and Shepherd say they have not received any reaction from either deans or the American Bar Association, which accredits nearly 200 law schools nationwide, but they are not the only insiders holding law schools up to increased scrutiny.

Civil lawsuits filed last year against a dozen law schools across the country are making their way through state and federal courts, Congress is looking into holding a hearing on law school reporting practices, and more details of law school employment data are surfacing regularly on the web.

This week, Columbia University and New York University’s prestigious law schools started to feel the heat. (more…)

When law school is worth the cost

Despite arguments to the contrary, law school can still lead to a lucrative career, but only if you plan properly and set your sights on one of the top 35 schools.

Not all of today’s law school graduates can expect six figure starting salaries, and as as a recent, in-depth New York Times article illustrated, many will struggle to pay back their school loans. This has long been the case. However, the Times article alludes to — but doesn’t fully address — an important distinction: The future is still very bright for graduates of the country’s top law schools.

While law school tuition continues to increase, so does the average starting salary of new lawyers. From 2006 to 2009, the mean salary for new lawyers increased from $62,000 to $85,198, and the percentage of first-year lawyers earning over $160,000 increased by about 10% from 2008 to 2009, according to a report by The National Association for Legal Career Professionals.

In 2010, most large firms reinstated associate bonuses and annual salary increases. For those who can secure a position at a premier firm, law is still a compelling career choice. (more…)